When the Trump Team Comes Looking for the Secrets of Obama's Iran File

Thursday's cordial meeting between President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama was a reassuring ritual of democracy. But Obama was far from convincing when he told Trump "we are now going to do everything we can to help you succeed." There are some highly disparate ideas here about what constitutes success, both foreign and domestic. There are also big areas in which one might reasonably wonder if Obama and his team are in a quandary over the prospect of a Trump administration inheriting the internal records of the most transparent administration ever.

Take, for instance, the Iran nuclear deal, Obama's signature foreign policy legacy, the chief accomplishment of his second term. The Obama administration's Iran file has been a realm of murk, crammed with dangerous concessions and secret side deals for terror-sponsoring Tehran -- to a degree that has left some critics wondering if Obama's real aim was to empower Iran as the hegemon of the Middle East (equipped with ballistic missiles to complement its "exclusively peaceful" nuclear program).

The cherry on top -- officially separate from the nuclear deal, but highly coincident -- was the Obama administration's secret conveyance to Iran early this year of cash totaling $1.7 billion for the settlement of an old claim against the United States.

Like Obama's other legacy achievement, the unaffordable Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, these Iran dealings were so intricate, extensive and opaque that we are still discovering just how duplicitous the official narratives were. Obama never submitted the Iran nuclear deal as a treaty for ratification by the Senate. Instead, he rushed the deal to the United Nations Security Council for approval less than a week after the final text was announced, and left Congress wrestling through the ensuing weeks, during the summer of 2015, to try to extract vital details from the elusive Obama and his team, subject to a legislative bargain so convoluted that the process, and the deal, never came to a vote.

For simplicity's sake, let's focus on the $1.7 billion "settlement" paid to Iran, which Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, apparently with no prior notice to Congress, announced this past January. Obama and Kerry did not mention at the time that the administration was shelling out the funds in cash, to be airlifted into Iran -- a form of payment especially handy for Iran's illicit ventures, such as terrorism and procurement for its ballistic missile program (the usual role of ballistic missiles -- which Iran has continued testing -- being to carry nuclear weapons, which Obama has assured us Iran under his deal is not developing).

Obama and his team also neglected to mention that $1.3 billion of his administration's cash bonanza for Tehran had come from the pockets of American taxpayers, via an obscure channel at Treasury called the Judgment Fund. It took months before such specifics came to light, which they did thanks not to the administration, but to the efforts of the press, and a number of persistent questioners in Congress -- to whom the administration sent tardy and evasive replies.

Questions continue to swirl around this cash-for-Iran arrangement. Was it a ransom for American prisoners released by Iran on the same day the Obama administration announced the $1.7 billion settlement? (The Obama administration has repeatedly asked the public to swallow the logical fallacy that because it is not U.S. policy to pay ransom, this was not a ransom).

Why did the administration -- until outed in August and September in a series of stories by the press -- make a secret of the cash, the conduits and the dates of delivery? What were -- what are -- the full terms of this confidential arrangement? Which, according to a Sept. 29 report in The Wall Street Journal, included, as part of a package of three secret documents signed in Geneva, U.S. backing for the lifting of UN sanctions on two Iranian state banks blacklisted for financing Iran's ballistic missile program.

Why have the relevant texts of all this wheeling and dealing been kept secret? Why has the administration repeatedly stonewalled questions from Congress? What were the machinations behind Obama's claim, after The Wall Street Journal on August 3 broke the story of the first tranche of $400 million in cash for Iran, that the U.S. government had no choice but to pay Iran with a mountain of hard-currency banknotes? Based on what internal calculus did the administration refuse to provide public confirmation for another few weeks -- until after the news broke in the press -- that the additional $1.3 billion in taxpayers funds had also been paid in cash? On the basis of what information, precisely, did Attorney General Loretta Lynch certify that Treasury paying out those tax dollars to Iran was in the interest of the United States?

The government of terror-sponsoring Iran knows the answers to many of these questions. The American public does not. But we can reasonably speculate that as this cash-for-Iran saga unfolded, it left a trail of records within the Obama administration. Classified, quite likely -- but surely there are some illuminating documents that someone with the proper clearances might wish to read.

Once upon a time, we would have called this a paper trail; these days it would more likely be digital. But at the very least, there ought to be the secret texts, the related justifications, requisitions and all the to-and-fro that would presumably be involved in the State Department, the Pentagon and Treasury (at the behest of the Justice Department, on behalf of State, with the blessing of President Obama), secretly organizing cash shipments totaling $1.7 billion for Iran -- and then, for months, despite persistent questions from Congress and the press, covering it up. Add to that the overlap -- or was it, as appears more likely, the coordination? -- of all that clandestinely conveyed cash with the return of American hostages. Then amplify this scene dramatically, to include the manufacturing of the mothership Iran nuclear deal itself, and the related handling of sanctions (which, as the 2014-2015 Iran talks stretched out from the initially planned six months to 17, appeared, despite administration protests to the contrary, to be ever more casually enforced).

Which brings us back to America's presidential election a mere three days ago, in which it sure looks like Obama and his team were blind-sided by Trump's defeat of Hillary Clinton. Misled by their own narratives, by their echo chamber in the press, by erroneous polls, by the same arrogance that begat the presidential rule of pen-and-phone and Ben-Rhodes-narratives, Obama and his team were expecting a handover to Hillary. She might not agree with them on everything, but as a former insider herself, as a candidate who was running to continue Obama's trajectory and cement his legacies, she wasn't someone whose access to the Iran file was likely to cause anyone currently in the White House to lose sleep (provided she'd really ditched her non-secure home-server proclivities).

And then Hillary lost.

Instead, here comes Trump. It's a good bet that until Tuesday night, the Obama White House never expected any such imminent intrusion by the Trump team into its closets. Trump has called the Iran nuclear deal "disastrous," and has said, variously, that he'll dismantle the Iran nuclear deal, or renegotiate it. On Thursday, one of Trump's foreign policy advisers, Walid Phares, told CNN that Trump will demand changes in the deal.

Whatever Trump does with the Iran deal, once he takes office he's entitled to have access to what's actually in it -- preserved in full, including any secret documents, understandings, promises or related bargains. This should include information that holds the answers to a great many lingering questions, among them the full rationale and terms of Obama's prolific concessions to Iran -- not least, the $1.7 billion cash payola to the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism.

Even with such access, assuming the records are in good-faith preserved and turned over in full, disentangling the truth from the Obama narrative could be complicated. Andy McCarthy, on PJMedia, warns the Trump transition team against trusting Obama's politicized intelligence on ISIS and al-Qaeda. It would be folly to rule out similar bias on Iran.

But if Obama has any desire to see his signature Iran deal sustained, presumably he, or his team, will have to divulge to his successor whatever his end of this bargain actually and fully entails, beneath the narrative and behind the official gloss. Otherwise, with no particular help from Trump, the deal may implode anyway. For Obama, during this transition period, it is, one might suppose, an unexpected and not entirely comfortable choice.